Are Document Management Systems complimentary solutions? Or are they becoming an Infrastructure Application? This is a fair question to ask, as many decision makers are not certain of the answer. In order to answer this question let us consider the following facts: 1. more and more regulations are coming into force that businesses need to comply with, 2. Greater need for the management of unstructured information and 3. Ever increasing demand from top management for information on time and with accuracy.
 
So what are holding companies from investing in DMS? And why there is hesitancy in making decision in this regard? The reasons are not perfectly definite, but it can be addressed by going over situations such as ¬¬lack of sponsorship of DMS projects from the top management, where some find it easier to keep managing documents on a department level where each department sets up its own document management policy, does this trigger any warnings?? Ok, what about the debate of “We have our documents scanned and archived in file system in subfolders”, and the traditional “DMS is expensive; we do not have enough budget”.
 
Honestly, all the above are valid and true points to a certain extent. DMS solutions are generating more interest as time passes by; we are seeing DMS projects surfacing on the radar of CIOs and IT Directors increasingly. New compliance requirements and business requirements are assisting in the justification of requesting budgets for DMS projects. Realizing the need for a DMS and a Document Strategy that is implemented organization wide is considered the loudest cry that will help businesses have access on time and with accuracy to information residing in paper and other electronic forms of documents and objects such as emails and electronic files. State of the art document management systems provide innovative and codeless means to integrate DMS functionality with line of business applications thus turning these applications into more accountable DMS enabled applications.

 
Justifying the cost of a DMS project is a relatively easy task, as return on investment can be realized within 9 – 18 months from direct cut down in costs of employees’ chargeable hours and savings in paper, consumables and files’ storage space. Some independent reports show that employees spend around %50 of their time searching for information, a simple calculation will reveal the huge savings.
 
Document management systems are maturing and are able to prove its value better than any time before. What could be a real good advice is considering investment on a document strategy and implementing a DMS that can cater for the evolving business needs in a reasonably uncomplicated way especially when it comes to the implementation of integrations and the document workflows; as these create an area that usually cause a lot of deviation during implementation in both duration and cost.

Mr. Rami Hasan

ITEC Area Sales Manager - GCC